What Are Communities of Practice?
A community of practice is a group of people who share knowledge about a topic, connect with each other, and create common approaches to the way they do their work. All organizations contain informal networks of people who share ideas and help each other with everyday work problems. Sometimes these networks congeal around a topic and form spontaneously into a community of practice. The topic could be a discipline, such as geology, biochemistry, social work, or civil engineering. Or it could cross several disciplines, such as a type of oil field, people who serve a particular customer or an emerging technology. These spontaneous learning communities spring from peoples natural need to learn from and help each other. Community members typically help each other solve problems, offer their advice, and develop new approaches or tools for their field. Over time, members of a community of practice can form a strong sense of common identity. As they share ideas about how they work and solve pr
Communities of practice are essentially networks of individuals with common problems or interests who “get together” – physically and/or virtually – to discuss current challenges, explore new ways of working, share good practice, tools and ideas. They are self-defined and self-managed and focussed on particular key issues or within a specific context. Some example definitions of community of practice can be found at the following websites: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice.
by Etienne Wenger Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. Not everything called a “community” is a community of practice. A neighborhood, for instance, is often called a community but is usually not a community of practice. Three characteristics are crucial: • The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membersh
Andrew Cox Department of Information Science, Loughborough, University, Loughborough, UK This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept’s reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger’s 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid’s article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger’s 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal
Related Questions
- Medical Billing service owns practice management software, doctor has an appointment scheduler integrated with the Medical billing service software?
- Does a medical institution as described in the class determination include a partnership of doctors, a medical practice or service trust?
- What Are Communities of Practice?
